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John Tilbury Cornelius Cardew Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music (1971-1988) http://contactjournal.gold.ac.uk Citation Tilbury, John. 1983. ‘Cornelius Cardew’. Contact, 26. pp. 4-12. ISSN 0308-5066. ! 4 John Tilbury Cornelius Cardew This article is a revised version of the text of 'Comelius oppressive as anything he had left behind-though in Cardew- a Memorial Lecture', delivered at the a different way: total serialism had achieved the Goldsmiths' College School of Adult and Social status of a religion whose followers defended and Studies, in association with the Music Department of counter-attacked with all the fanaticism and in- the college, on 26 April 1982. tolerance of true believers. It needed the intrusion of John Cage into those closed European musical circles I first met Cornelius Cardew at the Dartington to alleviate a situation that had become intolerable. Summer School in August 1959 when we were both 23 Even Boulez, hardly an innocent party in the proceed- years of age. My recollections of that month are hazy ings, commented: 'In Darmstadt between 1952 and and of no particular significance, but some kind of 1958 the discipline of serialization was so severe it rapport must have been established because soon was ridiculous. Cage represented a liberation from after my return to London I received a phone call from this.' Cardew. He had a project in mind, a concert of In 1958 Cardew attended concerts of American experimental music for one and two pianos (music by avant-garde music in Cologne by John Cage and the Americans Cage, Feldman, and Wolff, and by David Tudor. The radical content of this music, its Cardew himself), and asked me if I would like to be freshness and audacity, coupled with Tudor's the other pianist. In January of the following year the phenomenal musicianship, made a deep impression concert took place at the Conway Hall, London. on both Cardew and Stockhausen and was without Cardew's performances, in particular of the music of doubt the source of inspiration for Cardew's in- Morton Feldman, constitute to all intents and determinate pieces of the early sixties, and probably purposes my first lasting memory of the man as artist. for Stockhausen's first 'moment-form' works. Those floating, sourceless sounds, which he played Cardew's Two Books of Study for Pianists, com- with an unerring sense of timing and an artistry that pleted in the year of Cage's visit to Cologne, reflects was as convincing as it was unconventional, evoked the disruption caused by the American invasion. The an emotional response quite unlike any other I had continuing influence of Stockhausen is discernible in experienced in listening to music, and which was the application of a scale of six dynamics and in intensified by Cardew's profound identification with particular in the mobile character of the material Feldman's work. (within the given space of time the sounds may be How did Cardew's preoccupation with the distributed freely by the performer), but the ideo- American avant garde come about? This is an logical source of the music is to be sought else- important question in the light of the subsequent where-the isolation of tones, the feeling of dis- influence of North American culture on Europe, continuity (which later Cardew rather harshly especially in the sixties: Cage, Buckminster Fuller, criticised as 'laboured spontaneity') and the way- and the abstract expressionist painters, in partiGUlar ward harmonic language (though still constrained by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (to whom European considerations of structure) reveal that the Cardew dedicated his Octet 61). Cardew received his new American aesthetic had taken root in European formal musical education at the Royal Academy of music. Music between 1954 and 1957. At this time the In an illuminating diary entry on 1 September 1964, Academy was an extremely conservative institution in which he looks back on Two Books of Study, and it did not look kindly on the music of Schoenberg, Cardew comments: let alone Boulez or Stockhausen. So it was inevitable What I composed in this piece-the image that hovered in that inquiring, restless young souls like Cardew and front of my mind's eye-was a 'Musizierweise' (Mode of his friend Richard Rodney Bennett should have music-making). I invented a way of making music and reacted in the way they did, rejecting what they limited it to such an extent that musicians without construc- regarded as the narrow-minded and bland conserva- tion ideas of their own are in a position to adopt this tism of the English musical establishment. The musizierweise. European avant garde, on the other hand, centred in Darmstadt, paraded some progressive slogans; The indication here is already of his moving away serialism was associated with the scientific method, from music as object towards music as process, and progress, and discovery, and some apologists, such of a concern for the problems of the performers. as Rene Leibowitz, even claimed that serialism was Cardew was one of the first Europeans to grasp not the musical equivalent of the classless society. The just the musical but also the social implications of the music that Cardew wrote during his time at the new American aesthetic. And this was because his Academy, notably the second and third piano response to the music was not merely a cerebral sonatas, certainly owed more to Webern and Boulez rejection of the predominant western European than to his professors. And the performance that he compositional method-total serialism-but a deep- and Bennett gave at the Academy of Boulez's seated reaction to content and meaning, to the new Structures, besides being a considerable technical ways of thinking and feeling, to the idealism, both and musical feat, was probably tantamount to an act of moral and philosophical, that seemed to inform the rebellion in the climate that prevailed there. new American music. 'There is no room for the Under the circumstances Cardew's decision to policeman in art', Cage said in one of his polemics continue his studies and, as it turned out, to work with against the Europeans. Cardew's originality was that Stockhausen in Cologne was not surprising, though he created out of the new aesthetic a kind of music the consequences were not without a certain irony. utterly different from that of the Americans. The The conditions he found in Germany in 1957 were as String Quartet Movement (1961), and in particular ---- ------ - ---- 5 February Pieces (1959-61) for piano solo, perfectly In a related entry, on 12 September 1967, he wrote: exemplify this new departure, prefiguring the ideo- From America Columbus brought us back syphillis, or logical content of most of Cardew' s output in the early Death through sex; there is no reason why the compliment sixties. The influence of both Cage and Stockhausen should not be returned with myself as the humble vehicle, in is residual; the music possesses a strong impro- the form of total serialism-of Death through music. In the visatory quality, but the dangers of excessive sub- case of serialism the damage has already been done, jectivism (self-indulgence) are circumvented by the Schoenberg is the bearer of that intolerable guilt. 4 highly idiosyncratic and individual application of Having rejected both tonality and serialisrn, it was aleatoric principles. The result is a curious, com- not surprising that a radically minded young corn- pelling discontinuity; weird juxtapositions, irrational poser should have felt attracted to the American avant outbursts, fleeting references to other rnusics, past garde. But in fact Cardew's admiration for Cage had and present, create a kind of psychological dis- little to do with Cage's cornpositional techniques orientation, a hypersensitive music which haunts and (though he once described the notation for Cage's disturbs the memory, reflecting a mysterious, im- Variations I as a 'giant step forward');5 what he penetrable world in total disorder. admired was Cage's rejection of the commodity This expression of human agency at large, the spon- fetishism that had invaded musical composition, for taneous quality in the music-albeit in a chaotic, in- which the super-objectivity of serialisrn and its comprehensible environment -constituted Cardew' s corollary, the preoccupation with the perfection of the bourgeois humanist world outlook at that time; the ideal object, was largely to blame. What also thrust of his creative work throughout the sixties impressed him was Cage's liberation of the per- served to sharpen the various facets of the contra- former from the constraints of oppressive notational diction, the subject/object dichotomy, and this con- complexities, . and perhaps most of all the tinued until he espoused dialectical materialism in the 'democracy' inherent (at least in theory) in Cage's seventies. The late Bill Hopkins, that most perceptive scores. And here is the crux, because this concern for of critics, made the point in his review of Three freedom and democracy, displayed in a number of Winter Potatoes in the Musical Times in 1967: highly sophisticated indeterminate compositions 'Cardew was compelled to weigh up the claims of from the early sixties, though in an abstract and artifice (selection and ordering) against those of the intellectualised fashion, informs Cardew's entire spontaneity which for him represents musical truth.' 1 musical career. With him 'indeterminacy' was not Cardew himself expresses the dichotomy with ref- simply another cornpositional technique, displacing a erence to improvisation in a diary entry of 1967: previously discredited one, it was a logical musical I compose systems. Sounds and potential sounds are expression of his humanism: humanism is the vital around us all the time-they're all over. What you can do is thread that runs through all his musical activities, to insert your logical construct into this seething mass-a making for a continuity that overrides even the most system that enables some of it to become audible.
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